KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords

So for those of you who have played KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords, there's hope out there. Hope that the game might actually end up being finished one of these days.

This may seem a little bit redundant after Mass Effect has been released but I'm sure I'm not alone in considering that particular game something of a disapointment. Anyhoo, if you care, there is hope. It's called The Sith Lords Restoration Project (or TSLRP) and can be found here:

http://www.team-gizka.org/

There is an issue, though. Other resoration projects (such as the Wesp patches for Vampire Bloodlines) have updated the game gradually, fixing errors as they arise. Team Gizka, though, are waiting for the project to be complete before they release it.

On the face of it, this doesn’t make a massive amount of sense- bug fixes, restored dialogue and so on can all be implemented with little potential for error. What Team Gizka are doing with TSLRP, though, is far more impressive than a slew of bug fixes.

TSLRP is all about creating the game The Sith Lords should always have been- this means restoring ending sequences (we’re promised actual endings this time), a whole new group of people who want to kill you and the long lost HK droid factory. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, the short version is this: New levels, new character arcs and new enemies.

A lot of the new content should take place in the infamous last quarter of the game. Anyone who’s played The Sith Lords knows the bit I mean. You and your team hunt down Darth Nihilus, his ship blows up and all the character arcs suddenly stop in their tracks. The most amusing instance of this is probably Visas’s dialogue who is left professing her love for you over and over and over and over again because her dialogue triggers weren’t implemented properly.

This would all be fantastic if we lived in the land of milk and fairies but introducing this amount of content comes with a lot of problems. The reason the content wasn’t included in the first place was because it was very, very far from being bug free. Most of the work Team Gizka are putting in consists of making the game in any way stable. Because of this, it’s not a project that can be completed over night.

To be brutally honest, though, it's not a project that can be completed at all. I mentioned Wesp's Vampire Bloodlines patches earlier. They're still being released, five years after the original game was. The Sith Lords is no different. I make a point of checking their bug count every month or so because I live in the vain hope that the damn thing will be released at some point.

For the last four months, the bug count has gone up, not down.

They're currently at 84.

I do respect their wanting to release a perfect product but they're bedroom programmers. Fucking VALVE never release a perfect product, what makes them think they can? Arrogant pricks.

Sorry.

This all smarts slightly because if you look around their forums, there are constant posts asking for them to just give us a damn release, pretty pretty please? They're always met with open hostility.

Thankfully, all is not lost. Version 1.08 of the game leaked onto the torrent sites so you can get at it. It's by no means bug free but it's probably the only version of this damn mod we'll see any time soon so fill your boots, as the poet said.